This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

The Secretary by Kim Ghattas: Review

A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power

Kim Ghattas (Joe Newman)

Kim Ghattas's The Secretary, Times Books, 368 pages, $31.

By Robert Collison

Thu., May 30, 2013

Article Continued Below

When the Hafez al-Assad’s army marched into Lebanon in 1990, BBC journalist Kim Ghattas was a frightened and impressionable 13-year-old — but that searing act would shape her worldview of America for years to come. For young Ghattas, the US government’s acquiescence to the takeover of her homeland was payback for Syria’s participation in Desert Storm. To Ghattas it also conclusively demonstrated that the Americans were the Machiavellian puppet-masters who controlled world events. That “weltanschauung” seemingly persisted until she arrived in Washington to report on the exercise of American power, up close and personal, as the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent at the State Department.

Her assignment more or less coincided with Hillary Clinton’s appointment as Secretary of State and in her book, The Secretary, A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power, Ghattas describes in absorbing detail how the experience profoundly transformed her “take” on how American power is really exercised, globally, in the 21st century.

In point of fact, The Secretary is actually three books in one: first, it is a chronicle — and really rather an extended travelogue — of Hillary Clinton’s four year tenure as Secretary of State; second, it is a meditation on the changing nature of the U.S.’s role in the world and, finally, it is the story of a young journalist’s intellectual coming of age.

Book one, “The Hillary Chronicles,” details how the former First Lady, senator and once and likely future presidential hopeful logged over a million miles trying to repair the damage inflicted upon the U.S.’s reputation, globally, by Bush the Younger. His bellicosity and unilateralism would be replaced by a more collegial approach, where America would be first among equals rather than the chief bully on the block.

Both Clinton and Obama are keen to exercise what’s termed “soft power,” and for four years Clinton wandered the world assiduously attempting to create consensus among world leaders on numerous issues. Just as importantly, she was determined to talk directly to a global public via the social media, town hall meetings and seemingly endless confabs with women, students, youth groups, really anyone susceptible to Clinton’s unique charm. And if this book is to be believed, many, including Ghattas, herself, were, indeed, charmed. As presented here, Hillary is a very compelling character: smart, forthright, candid, cagey, sometimes blunt, and always approachable.

Perhaps Clinton’s greatest accomplishment as Secretary of State has been “acculturating” the world to the limits of American power in the 21st century. Throughout The Secretary, Ghattas ponders whether the U.S. is a power in decline and if American foreign policy under Obama reflects that fact. Unquestionably, the president has been eager to disentangle America from its ill-considered and expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Later in Libya and now in Syria, he has also been unwilling to allow the Pentagon to play its role as gun-slinging global policeman.

That fact clearly perturbs many who still view the U.S. as the one indispensable power capable of resolving all the world’s woes, including many, like Ghattas, who’ve long held antagonistic feelings about this fact. In a telling anecdote, she informs an old Beirut friend that, No, America is not behind the Arab Spring and has no plan to contain it. Her friend reacts in horror, “Kim, what do you mean there is no plan. If the Americans don’t have a plan, then who the hell is in charge of everything?” And the answer is likely no one, certainly no one state. And in the increasingly multi-polar world of the future this will likely be even truer. That realization is really the true denouement of Kim Ghattas’s eventful journey with Hillary Clinton.

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com